Wednesday, August 04, 2010

I was deeply flattered a few weeks ago when an old acquaintance and fellow lover of Anglo-Saxon poetry, Chris Jones, who lectures in the School of English at the University of St. Andrews, contacted me about my versions from that antique tongue. Chris was in the final throes of an academic article on modern poets who use or are inspired by Old English in their poetry, and wanted to include references to my various translations and other bits and pieces on OE.

His request is the kind of thing which reminds me why I became a poet. The thought of people out there reading about your work, and maybe going on to buy a book or two of it, or at least look you up on the net, is a very satisfying thing. I certainly didn't become a poet so my work could go unread. So any article which might flag me up to people with similar tastes and interests is excellent, by my reckoning.

If all this has whet your appetite for some Anglo-Saxon poetry, there are some odd pieces by me scattered about in various places on OE topics, but by far the largest example is my version of The Wanderer, a very famous Old English poem about a warrior adrift without a fixed abode, which can be found in my Salt collection, Camper Van Blues.

My version caused controversy when first published because the original was written in the voice of a man - or possibly several men - but I changed the narrator's gender to female, to match my own. But what are new versions for if not to test the ability of a poem to endure and reflect society's changes?

It took me well over a month to write that translation of The Wanderer, managing just 4 lines a day on average. But it was a highly complex piece of writing, and I wanted to try and reproduce at least some of the rhythms and alliterative sounds of OE verse - not just write a translation or even a version, in other words, but a poem which would work in its own right.

Anyway, I was very flattered to be included in Chris' article and hope it will lead other writers in the future to write their own versions, keeping OE verse firmly alive in the twenty-first century.

On Warwick Castle (ebook only)

"a Modernist piece de resistance" (David Morley)

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The Queen's Secret: Victoria Lamb

Published Autumn 2012

That's the kind of poet Jane Holland is, a superb thinker-ahead, a person who always knows where the poem is going to go, even before the poem has been written; and that's not in any reductive way, that's in a way that makes you raise your fist and go YESSSS!'

Ian McMillan, Poetry Review

Buy this newly REVISED poetry collection as an ebook on Amazon. Read it on computer, phone or Kindle.

Fun Tudor Fiction for Kids

Stories for Kindle or your computer, written by an eight year old.

"If Jane Holland didn't exist it would be necessary for us to invent her."

And those who saw/raw light ...

Kissing the Pink

Boudicca & Co. (Salt Publishing)

The Brief History of a Disreputable Woman

My first poetry collection (Bloodaxe, 1996) out of print but still available from me. Alternatively a revised Second Edition exists as an ebook on Amazon entitled "Disreputable".

'Jane Holland's Boudicca & Co is a book of adventurous, resonant inventions. As the title suggests, it offers a new view from the interior - of both country and psyche - in which history and geography are co-opted in effortless interplay. It's a work of synthesis, and of poetic and emotional maturity, in which Holland emerges as a true craftswoman, a supple and graceful thinker with an effortless grasp of line, at the heart of the English lyric tradition.'

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On Warwick Castle: a "modernist pièce de résistance" (David Morley) and "one of the more ambitious works of public poetry generated through a local laureateship" (David Floyd, Sphinx 10). Available to buy from Amazon and Nine Arches Press.

Matt Merritt on Jane Holland's LAMENT OF THE WANDERER: 'an original and moving re-imagining of one of the great works of medieval literature.'

Available as a chapbook with Introduction from Heaventree Press, or in CAMPER VAN BLUES (Salt Publishing, 2008).

Email Me

j.holland442@btinternet.com

Boudicca & Co: 'I reached the fourth section of the book, the Boudicca sequence, and everything went electric ... There's a touch of Vicki Feaver about the violence and the cool delight in blood and innards, but the work is quite distinctive ... I was dashing from poem to poem, completely compelled.'

Helena Nelson, Ambit 2007

Praise for Boudicca & Co

'Extremely powerful and varied ... Holland has both the clarity for the reader and the mastery of language to say what she means in a way that makes the brain tingle with both shock and pleasure ... This collection is outstanding.'

Read "Camper Van Blues"? Review it on Amazon!

Before the Wrinkles but After the Gregory

'... we need only compare Holland's work with the anti-war 'poetry' of Harold Pinter to gain some indication of how rich and rewarding her response to modern conflict is - by shifting methods towards the imaginative and narrative elements of poetry, rather than the rhetorical and political. In this sense, the 'Boudicca' sequence has a great deal in common with David Harsent's Legion, which represents a similar attempt by a non-combatant poet to engage intelligently with the realities of war. This is, frankly, an outstanding collection, and Holland, as a result, can now count herself amongst the front rank of contemporary British poets.'

Pollard on 'Boudicca'

"Boudicca & Co. is a bold re-imagining of Britishness. Steeped in myth and medieval poetry, this is a land of 'ruins under rain,' hares, oaks, gargoyles and the Green Man. At the heart of it, embodying both Britain's fierce beauty and its bloodied past, is Boudicca, and her voice is a startling achievement: modern, pitch-black, funny, and yet hauntingly lyrical."

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Nearby 'Old Nun Wood'

'There are limitations associated with female poets' espousal of the lyric 'I' ... If it is even able to move beyond the specifically personal and individual, it is only allowed to become the voice of a female collectivity.'